Everyday Tech Jargon

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the basic architecture and programming of apps and websites, you might want to scale your app, host it on a cloud platform, and deploy it on a orchestration platforms such as containers. Sounds daunting? That’s because it is.

Yet that is what deeply-technical writers do at their everyday jobs. The technologically complex products that our companies develop do not work in isolation. These products are used in an even more technologically complex environment. And to document these products well, it is imperative to understand the ecosystem they are used in. For instance, to document CockroachDB, me and my fellow technical writers at Cockroach Labs need to learn how to deploy CockroachDB on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and how to use orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker. And we have to evolve our knowledge in parallel with the evolving technological landscape.

This can definitely seem daunting for a beginner tech writer, and rightly so. But the important thing to remember is you can never familiarize yourself with all the technology out there – no one can. What you can do, however, is become comfortable with the technology and its ever-evolving nature. In my experience, learning how to learn is the mandatory skill for a technologically-literate writer.

To that end, let’s familiarize ourselves with the common tech jargon that forms the everyday vernacular of developers. Understanding these technical concepts will help you to communicate better with the developers and take on technically challenging documentation projects with confidence. This month’s resources will discuss:

How does the internet work? (Scheduled for 02/09/2018)

Cloud computing for beginners (What is cloud computing? Introduction to AWS and DigitalOcean) (Scheduled for 02/16/2018)

Containers for beginners (What are containers? Introduction to Kubernetes) (Scheduled for 02/23/2018)